Duke it out!

This was a 14 person local tournament at 2,000pts over 3 rounds, reason I’m mentioning it was I took the new WE book out for a spin. I’d obviously scoured the internet for all the broken combos which the WE book can throw out (after getting agreement that arrows could be duplicated across multiple units). I wrote a list on that basis, posted it up for everyone to view on the club forum and got feedback on how it looked pretty good. So I then threw it away and wrote something which would actually be fun to play with and contained all my nicer painted models for the army!

Dragon Lord, 4++ ward, charmed shield, spear
Eagle BSB 4++ HA, shield, spear
Lvl 2 Fire, ruby ring, dispel scroll
20 Glade Guard, Std, Muso, trueflight arrows
5 Glade Riders, Muso, Hagbane
5 Glade Riders, Hagbane
9 Wardancers
10 Waywatchers
Treeman

I’d not really considered it in advance but it’s only 3 drops plus characters which doesn’t really help the 20 glade guard out much, they become a really obvious target to aim for as a soft squishy unit of shooters. But the unit is 20 of Skarlocks archers so I really wanted to field them as a single unit because the way it looks is cool!

Round 1
First off I got a doozy of a matchup against HE.

Alariell, her banner on BSB, lvl 1 fire all in 25+ White lions with ‘that banner’. Backed up by 4 RBTs, 2x15 archers, 2x5 reavers and 2 eagles

Kinda felt like I was being punished! But that said I suspect my army was possibly better off than the netlist WE list against this as I was able to get over the table and smash up his weaker units with the dragon and BSB. I killed everything but the WL deathstar but sadly lost everything but the dragon (lord dead), BSB and 1 unit of glade riders. Overall lost by around 400pts so was pretty happy with how it went. 1,000+ pts in a single unit at 2000pts w/l/d event makes it rather difficult to pull out a win when the deathstar has a 2++ against 90% of the attacks in your army!

Round 2
To make up for that next round I got to play a daemon player who won their first game, the joys of being the smallest loser of the first round… This was a bit of the standard build and a bit of different stuff in the characters.

Lvl 1 slannesh general, nurgle BSB, 2 tz heralds (tz & metal), 2x10 horrors, 25ish PBs, 5 BoN, 2x1 BoN, 3 fiends, 5 furies, Cannon

Basically I couldn’t deal with the 5 beasts, What I should have done is made my wood a stupid wood and put it in the way in front of my army to force his movement to end in it if he just marched up twice, but I didn’t think of that so the beasts ran at me, my dragon ran at his horrors and I charged and killed them then he did the same to the rest of my army. My dragon then got pinned by a single BoN before ultimately getting charged by the cannon and broken from combat to run off the table.

I was left with 5 WW at the end of the game and only killed his tzeentch stuff, a beast and the furies. A big loss but one that was largely of my own making, that said if I’d sat back and played it tight he’d have just cannoned off my dragon and treeman to win anyway so might as well try throwing it all forwards.


Round 3
I was on 2nd bottom table and rewarded with a dwarf army with 2 OGs but no cannons or GTs.  

Lord on shieldbearers 5++ dunno what else, runelord 4+ steal a PD, BSB 5++ vs shooting in 6” and stubborn, 30ish GW warriors, 15 xbows, 20 hammerers, Gyrobomber, 2x organ guns.

From what I’d discovered the last couple of games I just sat so I could shoot off 1 OG at a time and the whole army attacked it & the Gyrobomber T1, I failed to kill either but his return fire was through my strategically placed citadel wood and bomber wasn’t in range to fly over anything. Next turn I shot both off (ambushing poison shots are great) turn after I got the 2nd OG and then surrounded his 3 blocks.

Being nice I committed to killing his GW warriors (and I’ve just realised I played them as S6 vs my dragon all combat thinking they were longbeards… He had only played 6 games ever so I was basically calling all the stats for combat so my own fault). Regardless I beat the block up killing them all and got to treewhack a BSB to death too, which was fun! Shooting dealt with the 20 hammerers and the 15 quarellers easily enough so it was only the 2 lords (runelord and dwarf lord) left on the table round 6. Dragon ate the runelord and the dwarf lord took 4 wounds from shooting (flaming sword on waywatchers was awesome!) and to end the game he suicide charged the lord into my wardancers who went killing blow and chopped his head off.

Great guy to play as kept his head up and was a gent throughout despite being utterly out of the game from early on. Having only played so few games before he’d never come across my style of list and it just does horrible things to a static army as I get to choose who fights when and where and there is very little he could do about it.


Overall had a great day play, 3 enjoyable games despite my feeling 2 of them I was really up against it and the third was a bit too easy. I do wonder if this will be a common occurrence for the WE, but will have to wait and see.
One thing I can say is playing the build I had was a whole lot of fun, having been heavily into the TK for the past while I'd forgotten just how enjoyable it is to throw a big dragon 20" forwards and say 'deal with that', in all 3 of my games the dragon was never really much at risk, flubbed and ran off the table vs the DoC and almost chopped up by the dwarfs (but I chose to go into that combat without really needing to).  Sure there will be games where someone just goes 'take it off' with a cannon but most of the time it's great fun to play with.

Next event is 2,999pts and I'm now going to take the WE again, still don't plan on buying any of the new units for the army yet, as there are plenty of the old ones which I still need to try out to see how they work first.